Administrating Angels
by Temple Cloud
Summary: Two students - one from Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, one from Diana Wynne Jones's Derkholm - come to work as interns at Sector General.


_Administrating Angels_

The admissions clerk was growing more confused by the second. He had known that of the two students who were arriving for an internship at the hospital, one was a life-form similar to Earth-human DBDGs in physiology, and from a planet with Earth-like atmosphere and gravity. The other had identified itself promptly with a four-letter code he did not recognise, though the L prefix indicated a light-gravity, birdlike organism. This was the one he thought he had been talking to. But when he asked for visual identification, the face and upper body that appeared on the screen were unmistakably DBDG: likely either Earth, Etlan, or Kryptonian, he thought. Certainly not furry enough to be an Orligian, Nidian, or Wookiee, nor green enough to be a Perelandran, and Vulcans had pointed ears…

'I'm sorry, have I made a mistake? Are you Florence? The geneticist?' he asked politely.

'No, she's asleep right now. I'm Ellis.'

'Oh! I thought we were expecting one DBDG, and one light-gravity being.'

'Yeah, that's me. Well, zero-gee, really – mum's people were designed to live in space, before artificial gravity was invented. I've been at uni on my dad's planet, but it's a pain sticking to floors all the time. Mostly I had to ride in a float-chair. Mind you, it was nearly as bad for Flo, cos magic doesn't work off her home world, and her wings aren't big enough to carry her without it. We wanted to turn the gravity off, for the trip here, but the crew didn't like it, and I s'pose you can't do much flying in a small cabin. Do you have gravity here?'

'Well, it's set to different levels in different areas, but we've got some gravity nullifier packs you can borrow,' said the clerk. But I'm just trying to clarify: _you're_ the DBDG, the one with two arms and two legs?'

'No, that's Flo. She's got two arms and two legs, like her parents, and two wings, like most of her sibs. Her dad gengineered most of her family, but she's the only one of his brood who's really interested in how it works. But anyway, her world's had tourists from another universe coming in for ages, so when Flo's people found a way to get out, she wanted to see how genetics worked on other worlds.'

'I see.' The clerk thought of the growing team of scientists working to find gene therapies for the problems facing his species and others, which so far had been treatable only by surgery in individuals. He thought of his grandmother, on the waiting list to have most of her limbs amputated to take the stress off her ageing circulatory system. He thought of species who traditionally had been sapient only in the womb and suffered irreversible brain damage in being born, whose only alternative was a surgically assisted birth on a mother who was conscious and unanaesthetised throughout, and might easily lash out with a tentacle or a club-like tail and kill the obstetrician. 'Please tell Flo,' he said, 'that we're all grateful for its help.'

'No, Flo's a she. I'm an it, like my dad.'

'Round here, we generally refer to all members of species outside our own as "it", explained the clerk patiently, as he did to everyone who ever arrived at Sector General. 'It's less embarrassing than trying to guess whether someone is male or female.'

'But I'm not!' said Ellis cheerfully. 'My big sister's a _vrrpt_ female, like my mum, and then my brother is a _brrbt_ like my dad, only male, and I'm a _prrpt_ like my dad, but a _vrrpt_ like my mum.'

'I'm afraid my translation computer didn't catch some of those words,' said the clerk. 'It's mainly set for medical terminology, so informal terms sometimes don't translate.'

'Oh! _Prrpt_ is just short for hermaphrodite – did it pick that up all right? I'm not male _or_ female; I'm both. If I say "herm" again, does it translate it now?'

'Yes, it seems to have learnt that one. But there were a couple of other words…'

'Oh, right. Well, my people were called _vrrpt_ by the _brrbt_ who designed us. I think _vrrpt_ comes from an Old Earth word for 'four' – I think we were originally called "quadrimanous" or something, and it got shortened to "quaddies". And we call them _brrbt_ because they live _down_ on the _side_ of a planet, so "downsiders". It's not meant to be rude or anything.'

Ellis adjusted the angle of the camera with one of its lower hands, placed where the ambulatory limbs would be on a typical Earth-human, so that the image showed its entire body. The clerk remembered a lecture he had once attended on Earth-human evolution, explaining how Earth-humans had evolved from four-legged ancestors that walked on the ground, to four-armed animals that swung from trees, through creatures who (like himself) walked on their knuckles while keeping their manipulatory digits curled out of the way, before eventually compromising on balancing precariously on the pair of limbs furthest from the head, flattening the feet to give greater surface area and preserving only the upper pair of limbs as hands. This sub-race had taken advantage of space travel to return to four-handed life.

'I see,' he said, thankful that he had remembered that Earth-human phrase. 'So, are you a medical student too?'

'I told you, I'm training as an LPST. I've done the basic degree, because there are quite a few couples back home with sexual difficulties, especially in marriages between quaddies and downsiders. But I wanted to do my PhD thesis on sexual customs in other sapient species, so I hoped to learn a bit more about that while I was working here, apart from what I've picked up staying with Flo's family in the vac, about what happens when gengineered griffins marry natural griffins. We don't seem to have any sapient aliens back home, you see.'

Light dawned in the clerk's brain. 'So – LPST isn't your physiology classification?'

'No, just my job: Licensed Practical Sexuality Therapist.' Ellis explained a bit more, but the clerk didn't follow much of it. He had heard that Earth-humans and similar species spent an astonishing amount of their time thinking about procreation, far more than was necessary to keep the population steady, but it hadn't occurred to him that they used artificial means to enable them to go through the mating process _without_ producing young, nor that they would pay someone who wasn't their life-mate to teach them to improve their mating technique. All he wanted to do was get married and start a family, all with six strong, healthy legs and no requirement to have any gender until they were old enough to decide for themselves.

He looked forward to telling his fiancée about the bizarre mating behaviour of Earth-humans, next time he saw her. She was only slightly older than he was, but had been married once before and was usually more worldly-wise, with a mischievous sense of humour. She had been male from puberty until marriage, become father to two children and mother to another, and had just been turning female for the second time after his then-wife had given birth to their third child, when she had become a widow after her turning-into-husband had been killed in a shuttle crash.

The clerk was looking forward to helping to bring up his step-children, and the children he would father or give birth to, but he had to admit that right now, what he was mainly looking forward to was his wedding night. He was lucky to be marrying a widow with experience of being both sexes, who could show him what to do, especially since he himself had been exclusively male all his adult life. Perhaps it wasn't so surprising, after all, that inexperienced, monosexual Earth-human couples sometimes wanted a bit of help, or that so many of those who trained as LPSTs were herms. He wondered what he and his spouse would do when they decided their family was large enough. After all, they both identified as predominantly male. What if they both wanted to be male in the post-childbearing years?

Yes, his universe needed genetic engineers. But perhaps it needed sex therapists, more than it wanted to admit.


End file.
